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BBC Horizon - The Six Billion Dollar Experiment
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by
on 2007-11-10 23:22:21 (edited 2007-11-10 23:25:39)
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I was stumbling around the net today, and came across the BBC Horizon documentary "The Six Billion Dollar Experiment". I was not impressed. It just goes to show you, US television is no worse off than the BBC, when it comes to science. What follows are the tyrannical ravings of a sane man trapped the insane world of popular media. [Switching on of the LHC] ... could trigger a catastrophic event, a black hole, able to destroy entire cities, and Earth its self... There is no scientific evidence to support this outrageous claim. The LHC works just like any other particle accelerator, but at higher energies. There is no way that the small amount of matter spinning around it's electromagnetic race track would be dense enough to form a black hole with enough gravitation to suck in it's surroundings. This opening statement is meant to get viewers, not inform people. BBC has produced a scare-you-mentary, not a documentary. [The scientists hope to do] ... nothing less than recreating the moment that exploded everything into existence: the big bang... Um, no? The purpose of the LHC is to smash things together. The temperature will be very high, like it was before universe inflated. This whole nonsense about the universe "exploding into existence" is misleading. Even the word big bang refers to an early conception of the theory. It is proper to refer to our current model of the early universe as inflationary theory. It did NOT explode. That's combustion. The early universe INFLATED. [The results of the experiment may show] ... how the indivisible units that make up our world were made .... The writers clearly don't understand what's being done here. We are not looking to find out how particles were made. We are looking to find out how they interact at high temperature. The key word is interaction. It doesn't make sense to ask how matter and energy were "made". They just are. How they interact and transition, now that's interesting! [These discoveries may lead to] ... a complete understanding of everything ... Ha! Yeah right. Even some miraculous grand unified theory would hardly be an understanding of everything. The goal of physics is to describe nature. No mathematical model can fully describe all of nature. The best we can do is unify and unify until we're down to one obtuse theory that predicts very little in practice. We still use the good old fashion classical approximations from time to time. The blow hard writers at the BBC don't seem to appreciate that, or want us to, either. [The discovery of the speed of light] ... allows us to see back in time ... Riiiiiiight.... The discovery of the speed of light allows us to see back in time. I'm gonna call bullshit on that right there. Any child can stare up at the stars, and observe light that was emitted millions of years ago. This child is seeing the past whether he can quantify it or not. Again, there's a beautiful point to be made, but the writers haven't made it. The whole discussion is reinforcing the concept of absolute time, which is an imagined thing, anyway. Well, i can't stomach much more than 7 minutes of this ... i'm out. 
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Re: BBC Horizon - The Six Billion Dollar Experiment
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by
on 2007-11-21 03:21:35 (edited 2007-11-21 03:24:25)
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what a coincidence even though, i did not see that trash documentary on the ''The Six Billion Dollar Experiment'' But i in fact have read information,on this project as i know up to now this project is all about re-creating the ''Big Bang'' theory All though it sounds facinating, and well maybe will give us a closer view in what is Nature, Or maybe set us back... ''The Large Hadron Collider promises to recreate the conditions right after the Big Bang. By revisiting the beginning of time, scientists hope to unravel some of the deepest secrets of our Universe.'' now one thing that is clearly beeing overseen here is,what if the ''Big Bang'' is actually re-created, We will get an image of well ''nothing'', I clearly see this experiment is great, indeed will help us have a clearer understanding on what truely is ''nature''..now there is a good chance of a black hole, beeing created thus in result of the (LHC) beeing run, All though chances are slim and ''IF'' if a stable black hole does appear it is expected to evaporate almost immediately via Hawking radiation and thus be harmless. It should be noted however that this is not a stable convincing argument because Hawking radiation is currently an untested theory. As i see this, They should maybe call this experiment "The Six Billion People Experiment" because theoretically we could blow ourselves to Kingdom come. It could trigger a black hole that would destroy Earth itself, but that's a worse-case scenario. =D This project may be the spark to the ''thousand answered questions, And a thousand new quetion's'' or it can be ''oh Sh%t'' Sound's scary, But the real deal in this experiment is not to re-create the past, but to bring back the material's that made the things that we are now, ''And how they interact with what exist's now'' and the result of how they will interact, is clearly beeing overseen. |
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Re: BBC Horizon - The Six Billion Dollar Experiment
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I'm going to side with gendou on this. The LHC like he said is very good at doing one thing, and only one thing, firing particles at very high speeds at each other and measuring the results. I doubt the idea on the black hole because I have heard elsewhere that the USA collider (of which the name evades me) also had a large scare about black holes a few years back and it got big enough the government had to do a press release talking about how it was impossible. So if the power was good enough there (and either black holes arent being formed or we are not detecting them) then I HIGHLY doubt anything serious could happen. Now even if it could, I say we got much better chances of being wiped out from any of the other numerous end of the world situations in our future (wandering black holes/neutron stars, giant asteroids/comets, Yellowstone eruption, nearby supernova, and the list goes on). The LHC yes can get the particles to the temperatures near the beginning of the "big inflation," but that most likely is not going to be the primary purpose. The biggest purpose is that when we built the previous largest we discovered a whole slew of new types of particles and energy and other types of things and that is relatively the same idea for this, but on a much larger scale. (I heard something about China thinking about making an even larger one, but that may have just been rumor.) |
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Re: BBC Horizon - The Six Billion Dollar Experiment
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by EricStillLazy
on 2007-12-21 18:18:53
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Well Gendou I think you are missing a one point in which this "documentary" has at least one merit albeit a non-science one. Marketing It takes a certain stretching of the truth in order for people to see justification in the cost of scientific experiments, it needs to seem "cool" they don't really need it for war, but its hard to convince people to give you 6 billion dollars to watch elementary particles interact at high temperatures. Ill end this on a quote by Robert R. Wilson to congress on why we build accelerators. "It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending."
WHOOOOOOOOOOO
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Re: BBC Horizon - The Six Billion Dollar Experiment
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by
on 2008-02-10 23:02:24 (edited 2008-02-10 23:02:34)
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Pickles. If I had it, I'd give you 6 billion dollars to watch elementary particles interact at high temperatures. It's just the kind of guy I am!
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